Alice did not answer at once. She had not, in her careful planning, decided how she would answer this question. She had assumed that he would not ask.
“Not tonight.” She held out her free hand, the one not holding the wrapped paint box, and waited.
Cassian looked at her hand, then at the wrapped box, then at her face. Then he crossed the small study and gently took her hand in his.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Where?”
“To the top floor.”
“If you plan to murder me, I have to inform you that I am much stronger than you.”
“Stronger than I am? I doubt it. In fact, I think I am considerably stronger. I have been the eldest sister for twenty years. I should put you on the floor in under a minute.”
A small smile, the smile he had worn on the dance floor and in the orangery and on the small wooden landing at the lake, curved the corner of his mouth.
“I do not doubt that.”
“Then come.” She plucked the long-unused brass key off the small hook on the back of the door.
Cassian did not stop her. He watched her take it. He had not, in sixteen years, allowed any person in his house to remove that particular key from that particular hook.
She did not say anything about that.
She tugged him out of the study with the small, wrapped paint box in her free hand and his hand in the other, and led him upthe back stairs to the top floor. She did not say anything else along the way.
The studio was on the south side with two long windows under the eaves. It had been swept. In fact, it had been swept very recently. The white sheet over the easel was very fresh, and the floor had been mopped.
Joanna, Alice realized with a slow warmth at her chest, had been preparing. She had been preparing for whatever Alice had decided to do in this room, and she had decided to be on Alice’s side.
Alice unlocked the door, opened it, and led Cassian inside before closing the door behind them.
She lit the candles in the two great branched candelabras with a taper that had been waiting on the windowsill since that afternoon, and two pools of warm yellow light slowly spread across the studio.
Cassian stood by the door.
He had not moved.
He saw the easel. He saw the canvas. He saw the small wooden palette lying on the table by the window. When she set down the wrapped parcel beside the palette and undid the brown paper,he saw the small flat wooden box with the brass clasp and the small painted dragonfly on the lid.
He went very still as if he hit somewhere he had not been expecting.
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“That is…”
“It is a paint set, Cassian.”
“You—”
“I thought since your father is not here, there is no reason you cannot paint. You can do whatever you want with it. Or nothing. It is yours.”
He did not answer.
He did not even move.
